The Press: In the Dock

In their consideration of Francis Powers’ U-2 trial in Moscow, few U.S. newspaper columnists bothered to meditate about the performance—and its meaning —of the defendant himself. Whatever nagging doubts newsmen had about Powers’ actions in the dock were left unsaid as they chose the safer course of excoriating either Russia’s shabby propaganda display before the world or its kangaroo justice. But last week, United Feature Syndicate’s William S. White, former congressional correspondent for the New York Times and now a columnist appearing in 120 papers, sat down at his typewriter, cleared his throat, and put into print perhaps the most forthright U.S. punditic criticism of the Powers case.

“It is not a comfortable thing for a man who works in safety to pass judgment on another man caught up far from home in an alien, so-called ‘court’ for a ‘criminal mission’ on which his superiors had sent him,” wrote White. “The easy, the sentimental way would be to sympathize with Powers—to say that, after all, he had his life to save and so why should he not have cooperated with his Russian accusers. But this would be a view as stickily dishonest as it would be superficially compassionate.

“For Powers was cooperating not so much with his own accusers as with the accusers of his government and his country. He was not, in the language of the American criminal courts, simply ‘copping a plea’ for himself. He was copping a plea for the U.S. When he accepted his job—and at $30,000 a year it was an infinitely better job than his background could ever otherwise have found for him —he took his chances. Here was no little boy who had lost his way in the Soviet labyrinths. Here was a man on a high mission who knew in advance of its risks—and of its privileges.

“Was he entitled then upon his capture —a capture which it was bluntly his duty to avoid at every cost, including the final cost of death itself—to save himself in the way he did? Now I know it is seemingly a cruel thing to say that another man should die, if dying is the only way to protect his country. But millions of men, far less favored than Powers, have died when they had to die to maintain their duty. An intelligence officer has no more immunity from death, when death is required of him, than any exhausted infantryman.

“With no wish to persecute one man, it is still sadly necessary to say it: In that courtroom we have suffered a small, an intimate, a personal Pearl Harbor—but not, unhappily, an insignificant one.”